Importing You Tube Footage

[Zane Barker]

First you need get permission from the copyright holder of the footage before you can worry about attempting to edit it.

**Hindsight is always 1080p**

[Mark Suszko]

First assuming you have the rights to use that footage… You can use a service like Dirpy.com to download an MP4, then use mpeg streamclip to convert to a format FCP can edit with.

[Chris Tompkins]

There are countless apps that screen grab or record screen.

Google.

Chris Tompkins
Video Atlanta

[Terry Mikkelsen]

Get the original footage…it will look much better.

Tech-T Productions
http://www.technical-t.com

[Mark Suszko]

He may not be able to get access to original footage; most of us would have tried that first, it tends to go without asying… if he’s asking a question like this, you should tend to assume that he would have used the better format if he could.

There could be any number of legit reasons he can only get the youtube file, same as, there are often cases where original footage is gone or inaccessible in time for deadline, and you have to grab stuff off the client’s DVD instead.

[Terry Mikkelsen]

…and just as often you find people who aren’t aware of the quality difference. (YouTube offers “HD” files now, you know?)

Just as often you find people here with no clue about the software they are using. They get a project dumped on them by higher ups or someone downloads an illegal version to “play with it”, etc…..

This is the basics forum, so the basics should get covered. Plus a basic internet search would have revealed quite a few plug-ins, stand alone software and hosted sites which would perform this basic operation.

I may not have posted the best and most comprehensive solution, but I do try to dissuade those from performing illegal activities. If I found my footage being used in any way, I will prosecute to the furthest extent the law allows. So I’m not the most eager to show how to steal other people’s hard earned work.

Tech-T Productions
http://www.technical-t.com

[Mark Suszko]

I don’t disagree with your sentiments. Nobody here supports piracy.

But neither should we assume piracy as a motive in every case of a format-conversion question, is all I’m saying. For a lot of more experienced people, the sudden flood of new formats and codecs is confusing. I know it is for me.

Take pity on me this week; for the first time, some check-out counter person asked me if I was qualified for the “senior Discount”. So I’m a little depressed.

Oh, and, sorry Rachel for the gender misidentification; I was paying more attention to the question than who it was coming from. Please get me off the hook in this discussion if you would, and tell us why you had to get the footage off of youtube instead of another format?

[Martin Curtis]

Common request for me: large organisation, lots of internal presentations (and, because it’s a hospital, lots of presentations of people’s internals…) and someone wants to put in a clip they “found” on YouTube and can’t understand why they can’t download it.

Once I confirm that the presentation will not be leaving our 52 walls (to minimise my exposure to lawyers), here’s how I do it:

• I use Firefox on my PC (which I managed to install while IT wasn’t looking) and a YouTube clip downloader. Here’s an example of one.
• Take the clip to my Mac
• On my Mac I have FCP, Perian (very important if the clip is in FLV format) and MPEG Streamclip
• Open the clip in MPEG Streamclip (which really needs a shorter name) and export it in the same format as my sequence. Since I’m a DV kind of guy, I use DV Movs.
• Bring in to FCP and work any required magic
• Export as QT ref movie
• Open that in MPS, and convert to WMV for the boz- I mean “clients” using PCs and PowerPoint.
• Confirm that their laptop isn’t a Dell with a stupid graphics display bug that our IT department still hasn’t fixed
• Explain a million times how to put WMVs into PPT and how to successfully move a presentation with video from one PC to another.

[Mark Suszko]

But your clients say: “Video is EASY: you just push a button and there it is! How hard can it BE?”

🙂

[Martin Curtis]

[Mark Suszko] “But your clients say: “Video is EASY: you just push a button and there it is! How hard can it BE?”
“
And then I make one with them (and I love to involve them in the process 🙂 ) and they discover how time-consuming it is. They all have that Zen moment – a look somewhere between enlightenment and exhaustion. And I generally do short ones. “A minute takes an hour to shoot and 10 hours to edit”. Said it over and over. I’ve generally worked out that 10 minute interviews/pieces to camera can be shot in an hour and edited in a day. One day I’ll make a video of a handful of satisfied clients explaining the process and pop it on the intranet.